Only This Blue

When faced with a life-threatening experience, one expects to be confronted with the big questions.What, however, can prove to have far more impact, is the disorientation and re-vision that grabs us by the nape of the neck and alters not only our sensations but perceptions of the normally unremarkable bits of the everyday.Warland evokes these startling yet often stunning moments and enlists her reader in the intrigue of this altered state of consciousness. Language, and literature, are often rendered in far simpler language when written in life-threatening situations, and Only This Blue takes us humbly into this awe of dread and wonder.

Only This Blue could have been written to be more obviously about cancer, or more like Warland’s disruptive experimental writing, but the experimentation here lies beneath the surface, in the same way that Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions is profoundly inventive,though it seems simply composed on the surface.